


Venus As A Boy

by gothyuckie



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Assassins & Hitmen, Blood and Gore, Drug Use, Explicit Language, Graphic Description of Corpses, Gun Violence, Homophobic Language, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Animal Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Remake of Léon: The Professional (1994), Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2020-05-18 13:13:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19335217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gothyuckie/pseuds/gothyuckie
Summary: "This life is cruel, so you must be crueler, Mon Minou.”Donghyuck was cruelly ripped away from his life at age 12, his parents murdered and his only comfort a young, peculiar hitman. Now, 6 years later and one of the most renowned men in his branch, he seeks retaliation.





	Venus As A Boy

**Author's Note:**

> [Book Soundtrack](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/43Kze11vrp19GWBl1qcAG9?si=NXrnUn1TRCazQ6axwDETRw) │ [Visual Concepts](https://twitter.com/gothyucks/status/1142937742566989826) can be found and linked on my [Twitter](https://twitter.com/gothyucks)

**Act I** House Of Velvet ****  
Amsterdam  
Red Light District

How is it such a morbid, abstract concept as our fatal flaw has the power crucify our fallen gods? The mystes follows: does it derive of a mans foolish mistakes, or is it the natural order of terror?

The ambiance of the Red Light District is a twilight of sex and money. It's June and the nights in Amsterdam are blood-hot, sensual in their red neon lights and the rich, velvety darkness of the sky. Midnight blue against the shadowy silhouettes of houses.

It's alluring, nights like this brings the most sinister, hysterical secrets and what is more human than to inquisitive about the macabre?

At the apex of it all, outside of the omnipresent and divine providence, three lines high and traveling with two suitcases loaded with kilos of cocaine, is Jung Jae-eun.

Despite the normality of the night — in the company of two women and neon lights incarnadine high on the white walls, casting shadows upon the vaulted ceiling as if an inferno is burning outside — he is unknowingly resting in a tiger's cage, about to face the precariousness of an epoch of deviance.

Jae-eun is a man infamous for his nature of moral; recognized as being deceitful and callous. For assurance, he recognizes it himself, shamelessly aware of the essence of his actions, more so, finds the magnitude of his malevolence deific.

He's got an ungodly charm, so terrible and cruel, it seems to apply to the part of our souls that is starving, the part hungry to be lured and desires tragedy and loss.

Jae-eun is laying on his back, skin incandescent and strands of wickedly black hair, opaque as ink, lays matted to his forehead in coils. His undercut is edging being overgrown, appearing thick and tousled, lovely against his features; tan and angular. Eyes sharp, promising vice and villainy.

His body, most distinctly, is covered in traditional tattoos; from the bold gothic lettering on knuckles down to the faded burgundy roses on his ankle and from his knuckles and down to his ankles, he appears as an cruel apparition of what a gangster should look like. Exhibiting royal tigers with deep, feral snarls and dragons whose bodies curve regally like vipers.

Gentle fingers sweeps across his chest, dainty and pale, tracing the intricate linework of his tattoos.

Her name is Aaltjae and Jae-eun sees her through a veil of turbid cigarette smoke, pluming in the phantom body of flames, her eyes wide with wonder and dewy with Jae-eun's prickling exhales. Glistening in an ombré of purple and red.

She's braced on her elbows, her dark hair gently brushing the protrusion of collarbones. Her lipstick devilishly red, and alongside the classical beauty mark on her right cheek, she appears as the kind of beauty who'd put a cigarette in a frenchman's hand, the kind of woman to put a man in ruins.

"What does this mean?" She asks, voice husky and carrying an opulent dutch accent, as she is sinking her pointer finger into the belly of an female angel inked onto his right chest.

"I think of it as a — ," Jae-eun pauses and tilts his head to make eye contact. Her eyes are sunless and riveted, awaiting an answer. "A fucking lucky charm, or some shit like that. Placed it right over my chest for the cunts who's tried to put a a bullet through my heart," He grins, showing two rows of teeth. "I'm not that easy to kill."

"So, it's like a guardian angel?" Aaltjae asks as she tenderly traces the halo.

"S'pose so, if you're one of those superstitious bible fuckers," Jae-eun scoffs. "Imagine dying by someone putting a bullet through an angel, how fucking ironic." He says and shifts onto his side. "I need another hit."

"Another?" Aaltjae places a warm hand on his waist and the tone of her voice is wondering.

"This coke is the fuckin' best on the market. Pure Colombian. S'called heaven in a bottle," Jae-eun's frame is lean and the muscles in his back moves attractively as he reaches over and grabs the baggie of cocaine and a hundred dollar bill from the nightstand, where he'd left it when he arrived and snorted his first three lines. "It's the best fucking sugar," He snorts in amusement. "Says it makes you see angels."

"You seem to be surrounded with angels, then." The other escort, Cathrina, says. There's a color of amusement in her voice.

Throughout the night Aaltjae had been the more talkative of the two escorts, or conceivable that was just her inquisitive nature, in contrast to Cathrina who appears more taciturn. When she does speak it is usually with a scintillating remark and Jae-eun figures she is the kind of person who isn't as fond of idle conversation.

She's stunning, with heavy glaringly red hair, skin tan and mottled beautifully with freckles from the bridge to her nose to her wrists. Her legs are long and slender and she carries herself with the practiced melodrama of a ballerina; elegant and poised.

Jae-eun chuckles throatily. "Huh, s'pose so. Fucking supplier said it made him believe in God. His fucking savior or some shit."

"Do you believe in God?"

Jae-eun's laugh is scornful and thunderous, churchlike in the way it seems to saturate in the walls.

"Fuck no. God is a fucking monster." He smacks Cathrina's ass. "On your stomach, baby."  
She giggles and compliantly does so.

Jae-eun carefully pours three lines of albino powder over the small of her back, crossing the depression of her spine, before reaching over again to collect one of the hotel's promotion cards to neaten the bars.

He pulls away and sits back on his heels, his calloused fingers gruffly working on rolling up a bill. The silk sheets wrinkles at weight of his knees, forming ripples akin to mosaics of rivers.

"Don't move." He orders, his hand squeezing the back of Cathrina's thigh as a warning.

Jae-eun bends down, using a finger to press his nostril safely against the tube of an euro bill, then snorts each of the three lines. He feels Cathrina raise goosebumps against the palm still resting on her thigh.

The back of his nose and throat burns and Jae-eun throws his head back in a groan, exposing a strain of muscles and the hill of his Adam's apple, then reaches up to massage the bridge of his nose. He feels vitalized. His body gradually growing flushed, the burn in his nose numbing to a dull ache.

Cocaine comes with a gratifying sensation of ecstasy, an explicit grandiosity, maddening and tyrannizing. He feels as if he has the world in his palms, as elusive, vain, or maniacal as that may seem, it symptoms him with an impetus to omnipotence and self -righteous confidence. It is secret, erratic, angelic.

Jae-eun had figured a long time ago that you aren't alive the way alive feel on a cocaine binge.

"Fuck." He rolls his shoulders and moans, the euphoria coursing through his veins almost makes his fingers curl.

"Feel good, baby?" Aaltjae asks. Her lips brush against his ear as she gently places her hands on his shoulders, massaging gently.

"Feel fuckin' invincible." He leans back. "Tell me," His gaze is sinistrous and calculating, fiercely so. A glowing ring of neon red haloes his iris. "How do you want to die?"

"How i want to die?" Aaltjae echoes. She muses on the answer for a moment. "Fast and painlessly. It's dumb, but i just want it to be painless. I don't want to feel it, you know?"

Cathrina hums, smiling faintly as she too, ponders. Jae-eun still has a presiding hand on her thigh, the soft flesh curving prettily around his fingers. "Dying next to someone you love. In your sleep and of age. It seems so peaceful to just slip away."

"Interesting," Jae-eun hums. It was such a Catholic dream, in its naivety and fear. "I think death should be painful. Death should be thrilling." He stretches his neck and tilts his head so he's looking at the two women sideways.

"You seem to have a thing for thrills." Cathrina remarks.

"Who doesn't? I fucking love danger. How else would i have gotten here, hm? Fears' a fuckin' human flaw." Jae-eun reaches over to teasingly twirl a stray lock of Aaltjae's dark hair around his finger. "If i were to kill you, i'd to it by strangling you. Squeeze the fucking life right out of you." He tucks the lock behind her ear. "You don't understand how fragile a human can be until you experience it for yourself."

Jae-eun straightens up, suddenly appearing exceedingly mischievous, as if he's been struck by an epiphany.

"Tell me Cathrina, have you ever strangled someone?" His teeth appear stark against the darkness of the room as he grins. The grip on Cathrina's thigh strengthens and it has the same manner as when he had warned her not to move. She registers the silent, pernicious threat. "Felt someones pulse cease in your hands.

At this point, Jae-eun's neurotic, vulgar passion for thrills, is transparent. It appears a cruelly sadistic joy, or perhaps, he is just successfully free from what yearns us to refine. The monotheistic devils. What lets wine be blood?  
It is chilling, and raises prickles at the girls neck.  
Cathrina shakes her head.

"Do you want to know what it feels like? That raw power of having someone's life in your hands." He advances, studying their reactions with the eyes of a tiger.

The girls laugh with ersatz amusement, the sound clear as bells.

The proposition, even in its menacing nature, appears cocky and ludicrous. As much as they have been required to play into client's kinks before, no matter how peculiar, this feels amiss.

"What's so fucking funny, huh?" He asks, the teasing smirk on his lips hold a sinister edge. "I'm fuckin' serious."  
"You mean it?"  
Truly, it is an undomesticated appetitive, emotive, temptation for someone as callous as Jae-eun to havoc the primitive denial of precariousness. What is awry, the women will belatedly realize, is the absence of arousal in his features. This man isn't seeking pleasure, but gratification for rage and hunger.

"Yeah, c'mere."

Jae-eun directs Aaltjae to lie down, then positions Cathrina, like a porcelain puppet, how he desires. He guides her through it, large hands blanketing hers as he places them on Aaltjae's throat. He tells her, voice raspy in her ear, where to press and how to navigate her throat.

She is so exposed like this. Practically vulnerable for anything he has strength for.

Jae-eun hums and Cathrina can feel the vibrations of his chest against her bare back.

"Depending on where you hold her, where you press down — there — you can compress her airway, or — there — fuck up the blood flow in her neck. If you do it like this — ," He guides her hands, stroking them over the plane of unmarked skin. "You can work a combination of both."

"Won't i hurt her?" Cathrina asks.

"It's gonna fuckin' hurt. She'll fucking feel it, don't worry. Think of this as claiming your power, sweetheart. It must be a rare opportunity for you whores, no?" His breath fans against her ear and Cathrina fights the urge to shy away. "You can fracture bones if you squeeze hard enough. I personally prefer compressing the airway, it always makes them struggle more."

He shifts a bit, warm breath now fanning her shoulder instead.

"She's gonna be scared. They all get scared once they realize they can't fucking breathe. You have that power now." Jae-eun says. Cathrina senses his cruel anticipation.

He squeezes her hands, body crowning her frame and shielding her unmarked skin with artwork.

It is a strange sensation, for Cathrina's hands are much smaller than Jae-eun's, so her hands slip clumsily to find balance as he squeezes. Aaltjae squirms beneath them, the feeling of something putting pressure to her throat foreign and unpleasant.  
Jae-eun however, does not falter.

"You know, a lot of people confuse strangulation and choking. Dumb cunts tell the pigs their boyfriend choked them. How they're so fuckin' scared of their life. As if they mean anything in this world. I mean they can't breathe so why should it matter. No no, choking is out of your control. Strangulation is manmade. It's power."

Cathrina whimpers.

"I used to wonder how many colors a person could turn." He tightens his grip, his nails are cut short and short the tips of his fingers are turning white. "It's so easy for a person to break, so easy for me to just snap you in fucking half. There's people in this world that strangle others just cos' they want to show that they can. Nah, i'm better than that. Think of me as giving you mercy. I'll just end it all."

Jae-eun loves throttling. Possesses an unyielding appetite for the feeling of a heartbeat against his palms, blood-hot and trembling against his inked fingers.

He owns many guns, opalescent and lethal, but guns are ultimately nothing but an object. They keep you on a distance and up until the very moment, with the span of a hair's breadth, to which you pull the trigger, you are detached from your target.

He enjoys this sensation much more. For, in his judgement this is authentic, genuine. He is holding someone's life in the literal palms of his hands. This is the closest thing he can ever be to a god. Pure, angelic power.

"No, no. Fuck, i can't do i. I can't do it." Cathrina whines.  
"Shh, soon she won't feel the pain anymore, sweetheart. Just a little more."

Cathrina abruptly pulls away. Her fingers slips from Jae-euns hands and in her haste, slams her body into his side, head hitting his chin with a ghastly thud. She sits back on her heels, face quivering. "I'm sorry, i can't hurt her. I don't wanna hurt 'er."

The silence is deafening and the following seconds appears as a disbalanced, disordered limbo of which it is hard to find your bearing. Jae-eun's eyes obscures, red as blood and with equal ill intent. His fingers roughly rubbing at the angry red mark on his chin.

"You _useless_ whore." He snarls and rises, the Goliath of a shadow grows across thew wall, velvety and magnified. He wrenches his entire arm back, muscles flexing like a sculpture from the romans, before slapping Cathrina with tremendous force across her face. The oppressive sound of contact echoes sharply in the room.

She falls backwards in patent shock and lands on her butt. She gasps, hand flying up to shield her cheek as her grave eyes burnish in pain.  
A red mark shaped like a palm blossoms across her skin, warm like a devil's kiss.

If Aaltjae gasps too, Jae-eun is far too gone to register it. His breathing is heavy and erratic, muscles clenching and unclenching in contained, undiluted rage.

Jae-eun has never been good with restraining his anger, always easily provoked and defensive. The acuity and vigor he nurtures from binging on cocaine intensifies his torrents of emotions and in this state his anger is simply, devouring. In a sense there is no Jae-eun, just pure rage giving impetus to a host. "Maybe i'll toughen you up a little then, yeah? What do you say about that?"

He surges forwards, toppling them over and wraps his hands around her neck with enough strength to press her into the mattress. His eyes are bloodshot, pupils pitch black and dilated into eclipsing moons, perilous and primitive. His arms gnarled with veins, bulging and winding as a multi headed serpentine, a carnivore of flesh and scar tissue. "Or is that all you're fucking good for? Being a whiny bitch."

Slim fingers feebly grips at his wrist.  
His pulse is lively beneath Cathrina's hold and she pays little mind to if it is a cause of the snow or the arousing thrill.

There was something so sinister in how the lights — red as hell-fire and entirely as amorous, bleeding into the bold purple lighting of the suite — casts shadows on his face. He appears as a devil's mask, cheeks high and eyebrows curved downwards, eyes burning unbelievably dark.

Cathrina's gags are unsettling, violating and a stalking terror, trapped in the walls of the room. She is kicking her legs in unadulterated panic, attempting to contort her body and jerk around to tear away from his grip.

He only squeezes tighter, then places his lower leg over hers to hinder her kicking at him. His weight is greater than hers and there is little she can do in this position to escape. Cathrina's face is turning into an absurd shade of red and when she opens her mouth she only makes a string of guttural noises.

Jae-eun can see the fight start to bleed out of her and in a final act of desperation she reaches up to to claw at her neck, leaving rows of irritated scratch marks on her skin and over Jae-eun's hands.

At a point, girl bleeds into satin. Girl blurres at the edges, girl becomes death. Her body is gradually relaxing, fingers uncurling slightly and eyes droopin, they haze over and almost rolls back into her skull. At a point she will forget her own name.

The satin sheets will be nothing but an haunting aide-memoire of tonights remedy.

Then, the door to the suite abruptly opens, flooding the room with the backdrop of yellow lighting and the magnified shadow of a man, throaty laughter and a waft of cigars. There is something so grittily European about it, the romantic vaulted ceilings and smell of tobacco, the classic danger, black suits and shirts with french cuffs, prismatic tears, the vow of secrets.

Jae-eun lets go of Cathrina's throat and gives the broad man standing in the door frame his undivided attention.

"There's someone here to see you, boss." His voice is gruff and equanimous. He's called Joker Jun; for he has the conspicuous trauma of a glasgow grin. The scar is violent and askew. Two rough ridges originating from the corners of his mouth and stretching across his cheeks.

Jun has the biggest fucking smile Jae-eun has ever seen.

"Said it was urgent." Jun fills in.

"Well, fucking take care of it then."

Jun nods and leisurely looks between Cathrina, who was beginning to regain her consciousness with raspy gasps of air and frenzied coughs, her slender hands grasping guardedly at her throat and Aaltjae hunched in the corner of the room, her body trembling and face wet with hot, opalescent tears.

He gives her a nod of acknowledgement, then turns and lets the door fall shut quietly behind him.

For a few moments, within the confinement of the room, Jae-eun sits knowing a storm is brewing. For a few moments, the entirety of the floor is eerily silent and anticipating.

Albeit muffled by the door, the sound of gunshots remain imploding.

An unyielding force of power reverberating through the walls and the gunfire seems endless. Deafening and oppressive; the climax of an orchestral piece, the thunder of a bank robbery, the cruelty of a faux killer.

Though, Jae-eun does not feel alarm. He has made many enemies during his career and pays his men well knowing so. They're trained to handle themselves and furthermore, it would be foolish to think that even if not for the loyalty and cash, that they wouldn't fight tooth and nail to save their own lives.

The lightning of muzzle flashes is visible through the tiny gap beneath the door and so is the shrill sound of shattering glass. Aaltjae sobs as a gunshot seems to fire right outside the room, deafeningly loud.

The rounds of gunfire cease almost as abruptly as they started, the sensation harrowing and disorienting. This imitation of tranquility, lacuna in the storm, is nothing but a sinister oath. One that gives Jae-eun unease.

In silence, it means that his men are fallen and in silence, he has to face his demons himself.

He swiftly gets up from bed and pulls on his pair of black slacks he'd left on the floor, then grabs his gun from the bedside table. An _IMI Desert Eagle Mark XIX_ , the neon lights rich and reflecting in the stark silver of the brushed chrome.

He registers the escorts gasping — Aatljae is still curled up in the corner of the room, her back pressed against the white wall and Cathrina whom is now pressed against the headboard of the bed — but pays them no mind. He is going to kill the son of a bitch and perhaps if luck abides; let him suffer, too.  
After all, this faceless figure has caused a terrible disruption.

When running in the drug business enemies are a casualty, however enemies with power enough to dispatch an entire room of his goons and most trusted second in command?

That is unparalleled.

Jae-eun unhitches the safety and holds it in front of himself, firing it haphazardly across the expanse of the wall. The bullets are sizzling and breaks off chunks of isolation, going through the wall with satisfying fracturing noises.

He stops and listens for sounds. The bullets must have gone through most of the floor's breadth and as he detects nothing but silence he steps forward in anticipation.

He goes to nudge the holed door of the suite open. He uses the slide of his gun instead of a hand to push it wider and the steel sliding against the weight of the door makes him wince.

The door opens as far as it can, before thudding against the shoulder of a dead goon draped across the floor.

Jae-eun steps out of his room, vigilant of his surroundings, walking on wooden splinters with bare feet.

It is eerily quiet, foreign to the usually forceful spirit of his company.

The goons are splayed across the room evocatively and royal, like art of the Italian Renaissance.

Their suits ink-black silhouettes against the walls and outlined by the neon lights outside, bleeding into the rich night blue.

A goon has gone through the glass tabletop of the coffee table head first, arched across the hollow frame melodramatically. His hair is full of minute shards of glass, and they glint expensively in the neon lights.  
Right behind him another goon is slumped against the wall. Two shots to his chest and skin a ghastly pale.

The elevator is shattered, large shards of glass in sizes of hands scatter all the way out into the foyer.

The lights flicker and illuminate the silhouettes of three more bodies in a cold yellowish glow.

Even in death, Joker Jun had the biggest fucking smile Jae-eun had ever seen.  
He lays half in the light from the elevator, cheek pressed against the floor, scarred fingers still looped around the hold of his _CZ 75 Phantom_. The collar of his dress shirt harrowed and soaked in a dark red.

It appears as an almost haunting realization, that perhaps, if not for the nimiety of gaping gunwounds covering their bodies and the exhibition of their eye whites, Jae-eun might have believed that in the saturation of the neon lights, they are alive.

8 bodies no one can resurrect. 8 bodies to inhume.  
In the tender night, as soundless, and grave, death moves at such a great rate, an inexorable force, that not even a hummingbird could catch it in action.

It is so silent and Jae-eun's panting feels so loud.

Something warm trickles from his nose and down his upper lip and Jae-eun knows it as the far too recognized feeling of blood.

"Fuckin' coke." He curses as he scans the floor. He can't see any movement and in a split, foolish moment he allows himself to chuckle cockily. "Got that son of a bitch."

Two gunshots go off, imposing and thundering followed by a moment of oppressive white noise, in which Jae-eun feels a dull, dreamy ache in his shoulder and another one right beneath his scapula.

His arm is grabbed and his gun harshly gets knocked out of his hand. He's maneuvered to slump against the wall, where he slides down and sits on the floor, leaving two horrible long streaks of blood incarnadining the white paint in his trail.

Gunshots are incessant and cruel, and Jae-eun learned early on how the impetus of its recoil felt against his unknowing hands. How they ache and tenses in innocent arms.  
It is quite terrible, that force that keeps a finger on the trigger.

For a moment Jae-eun passes through a suffocating sensation of rubatosis, cruelly aware of his heartbeat beating loudly in his throat.

He blinks and with a bright, cruel clarity, almost as an apparition of some fiery devil from hell, he sees wild curls of red. He is being straddled by a boy who presses a gun, black as night, into the square of his forehead. The muzzle is a hot mouth of a devil against his warm skin. "Move and i'll blow your head off, fucker."

Quite terrible, indeed.

Jae-eu discerns through a laborious attempt to gain his bearings again that has has been shot, not registering much of the pain but instead the blood sliding down his chest, hot and intimate against his bare skin.  
He is panting, body spasming slightly, and although it seems as his adrenaline has dulled some of the pain, his shoulder still burns mercilessly.

"Who sent you?" He says, voice strained .

"This is personal." The boy says and Jae-eun arduously grunts, his mind distant until the boy adds more weight behind the press of his _Beretta 92F_.  
"I want you to fucking look me in the eyes." His voice now clear and unyielding, the polymer of the muzzle still warm as he pushes Jae-eun's head back until their eyes meet.

Glossy eyes, dusky and big, Jae-eun sees himself anaemic and sweaty haloed in the pupils.  
"Good, now tell me Jae-eun, do i look like someone you've killed?"

His hair is wavy and long enough to brush against his brows, thick and a bit overgrown in the back, enough to be tucked behind his ears. The color a dimmed wine red, casting dark shadows beneath his brows, as velvety and long as the long shadowy eyelashes stretching across his cheeks. His ears are lined with a sequence of gold hoops starting from his helix and traveling down to his lobe, the color rich and attractive against the warm tan of his skin.

He's dressed in a pair of black fitted slacks and a black silk shirt, half tucked into his waistband and unbuttoned enough to pool around his neck and collarbones. The outfit is alluring but anonymous enough for the opulent hotel, vast with pearl marble flooring and crystal chandeliers, but a great contrast against his thick black bulletproof vest, unzipped and hanging over his shoulders. A dainty gold amaryllis embroidered onto the left chest, right above the heart.

The boy is tantalizing in the neon lights, he also looks like death.

"Nah, i would've remembered a pretty face like yours." Jae-eun says, his voice husky and masked with a lazy grin, grotesque as a thin amount of blood seeps through his teeth.  
A Fight Club smile, as morbid and queer as the ghoulish senses of addiction to violence, to freedom and rock bottom.

"6 years ago, Lee"

"Fucking Lee." Jae-eun spits.

When Jae-eun first was initiated into the drug business — fast ways to heaven and even faster cash — the gunshots had given him tinnitus.

He had been fresh into his 20's, wearing his first suit — Yale blue and of cotton, just expensive enough to be adorned with surgeon cuffs — and standing in front of men who had hands and bruises bigger than he felt.

Then, he'd earned the nickname Jails. He stuck with that, Jeon Jails with sarcastic laughs and rough hands. As Jails, and not Jae-eun, he was high enough in the ranks to carry weapons with sound mufflers.

Late in his twenties he had found the syndicate. That came to be his first real taste of power: drugs, corrupt forces, status, money. The kingpin and his men, they had governed the police forces to work as their gun dogs and even only if as a looming shadow, ruled the streets of New York.

Power is such a strong, addictive force, Jae-eun had realized and if not for the right understanding, it may drive a man insane.

In his thirties the syndicate had disunited.  
Not bitterly, but rather with satiation for this interlude. Jae-eun yet had his hands in drugs, but turnt to foul gambling for his prosperity, hiring goons for his own idle state of protection.

Living a lifestyle centrifugal of gratification: Brioni suits, hustling, stimulant drugs, expensive alcohol and escorts who'd trace his tattoos and giggle at his habit of smoking in bed. Escorts are easier, void of the hierarchy of pimps.  
He can see it on them, how prostitutes smile with an invisible gun to their head.  
There were less strings attached when he'd lose his temper, as it seems as all ends up a pale face indistinct against pale sheets. Ghoulishly dragged out by their ankles, necks saturated with ghastly shades of purples and the callous covenant of corrupt polices unseeing.

Mr. Lee, during the interlude that Jae-eun had known him, had been under the gunpoint of the syndicate. But he had been foolish, or perhaps blinded and valiant by his own desires, to think that the shortfall of revenue would go unnoticed, and so, consequence was vital.

Jae-eun sees it now. The young boy with dark curls and an ample cheeky grin, and he coughs out a disbelieving laugh.

How inconceivably injudicious they had been to leave, knowing they left a boy alive.  
This boy is deplorably his fatal flaw, he supposes.

"Start talking Jeon, where do i find the rest of your net? You know who i'm talking about. Give me info."

Jae-eun shifts underneath the boy — straddling his upper thighs — and his lips stretch into a sadistic grin. His eyes are dark and crinkling with laughter lines. "Fuck ur pa was one ugly motherfucker, you know that? But i can't wait to get my hands on you sweetheart. What do ya say put down that gun now, yeah?"

"Sick bastard." The Lee boy spits, his sharp eyes vehement with malice and framed in long eyelashes, appearing much darker in the shade of his hair.

His face is abask in the color red, soaking up the neon lights, so traditionally erotic and alarmingly felicitous in their derivation from danger.

"Death is a fucking turn on, sweetheart" He shifts his weight again and grunts in pain as the bullet wounds chafe against the wall, his grin waning alongside the dying moon. "I still remember your father, riddled with so many bullets he was more brass than flesh. Emptied an entire 9mm Uzi magazine into that fucker. I would've gotten a picture of him if i knew you were coming to visit me."

The boy doesn't give a visible reaction, instead retrieves an object from one of his pockets.  
What looks like a valuable black case, split by a depression running down the middle. Each sides had a line of apertures, exhibiting a stunning translucent muted red glass.

The boy moves his wrist and the case falls open to reveal a beautiful, ornate butterfly knife.

Jae-eun watches with inquisitiveness as he moves his hand with intent, snapping both counter-rotating handles in place.

The action is evidently, maybe wickedly so as to the mind of someone less intimately execrable, familiar and natural, but to Jae-eun's heinous psyche it aroused excitement, exhilaration.  
A man with calibre so inclined towards danger is elusive in a world of John Doe's, illicit trysts and drug money.

The blade is a black sheet of gunmetal and wears a dainty gold amaryllis engraved in gold at the base. It catches the light, the sight hauntingly, threatening in its edges and gleaming with warm silvers and reds. The handle is equally as black and presenting the same strikingly, alluring pattern of red glass.

It looks elegant and familiar in the Lee boy's hands, the sheen of the blade ever so pretty against his tan skin, and much obviously _recherché_.

"What do ya say about my slicing your fucking tongue out, yeah?" He taunts. "How about you start talking Jae-eun, otherwise you really don't have any more use of it, no?"

The white light from the elevator bounds off the reflections of the scene; glass shards, marbled veins and small city-rain pools of blood, giving them a heavenly lustre. The open mouthed snake on his neck moves as he gulps — fangs bared and wickedly sharp, neck curled predatory and smoothly — a pearly sheen bounding off the heated skin.

"Do you really think you can kill me? There is no space for retaliation. Go home kid, this ain't some playground for you to cry about your precious little mommy and son of a bitch daddy being dead." Jae-eun pauses and laughs with the impetus of a maniac, his teeth a gruesome red inundated in blood, vibrant against his eyes burning sienna in this lighting. "I'm flattered you've remembered me this long. Even through death, after all this fucking time, we're still your fucking Teraphim's."

The cruel phantom of a god, who has such a heinous, devilish nature, who is ignored to elude thilling our own primitive instincts of slaughter and destruction. Deduced to the threat of monotheism, deduced to nightmarish fears.

This violent ecstasy, must suffer a violent fall. Ghoulish to his very, last breath.

The boy's eyes rivets onto Jae-eun's hand, moving to rest solacing over an angel on his chest, and he smiles viciously. Shadows cast underneath his eyes and gentle concavity of cheekbones, appearing as untouchable till the very end.

"And i'll be the last fucking thing you see before you die, what does that make me?"

9 bodies no one can resurrect, no satiation to desire.  
We're all villains, and he suppose gods, no matter how illicit, aren't too hard to kill, anyways.

Donghyuck Lee is destroying history.

The boy pulls the trigger.

( **22:37 The Fall a Joker**

Jun is taking a round through the room, walking in a wide circle with alert eyes.

The goons are laughing throatily and smoking European cigars and the two briefcases loaded with kilos of coke rests guarded on one of the tables when the white phone connected to the lobby rings, shrill and insistent.

Jun picks it up and through the static fractures, awaits for the receptionist to speak first. He registers the young man taking a shaky breath, his voice is quivering as he finally speaks.  
"There's someone here to see you." he says.

"Who is it?" Jun asks gruffly.

"Someone very persistent."

Jun distinguishes the crisp click of the hammer on a gun being pulled back through the faint static of the phone line, almost theatrical in its threat.  
He hears how the receptionist gasps, and how his exhale trembles.  
Trouble, indeed.

"Send him up, then." Jun says calmly before hanging up.

He instantaneously barks out to the goons in the room that they're to await an arrival with gunfire, then gestures for two men to get in position in front of the set of elevator doors.  
They're the color of a cold silver and the mens reflections are long and distorted in their reflection.

They stand, guns drawn, following the increasing numbers glowing in a soft gold on the panel displaying the floor of which the elevator is located and it climbs with only a faint, even zapping noise.

The looming consciousness of something violent approaching appears achingly ominous in the near silence.

The men all hold their breath as the doors slide open, only to reveal the elevator to be vacant, just reflections on reflections of the mirror walls.

It is strange, truly, and Jun pushes his index and middle fingers together, gesturing to the two men to examine inside, who follows his order and reluctantly steps into the elevator.

The elevator doors slide shut soundlessly, while the two men are still scrutinizing its insides.

The room blankets in darkness for a moment, calm in nature and entirely as out of order, until there's a muffled sound of yelling, followed by a series of gunshots and glass being shattered. The men in the room tenses in trepidation.

The elevator once again pings and now, as the doors slides open, they reveal the two bodies of the men.  
The goon closest to the doors is laying on his stomach, his head faced away and hand limp beside his head. The other was on his back, mimicking the position diagonally. There's blood collecting in puddles underneath them, the floor is covered by acute shards of the mirror and a scatter of loose bullets, still searingly hot.

Both deceased by gun wounds without no visible culprit. Jun curses.

If only, he had seen the boy, sitting as a shadow on the roof of the elevator, hovering over the open hatch door.

He has a loaded semi-automatic in each hand, as sleek and black as the night, held flat against his chest in cruel familiarity.

He secures his legs as when hanging from a monkey-bar, the back of his knees pressed against the metal edge, and lets his upper body fall so that he hangs upside down.

The moment of surprise is vastly valuable, perhaps vitally so for a life, and it gifts him enough momentum to fire at his targets.

Most of the noise a gunshot makes is expanding gases as it kicks free from it's chamber and the force travels through his arms, unwavering as he fires at targets in rapid speed.

The job is over in almost an instance and the imposing incessant noise of gunfire leaves a discordant silence.

It is easy, really, and it no longer hold equal adrenaline as to when Donghyuck was new to the job.

He tucks one of the guns into the waistband of his pants and then he grips the edge of the hatch with his free hand to flip himself down. Agile as a cat from years of practice.

His boots land on the elevator floor with a crunch, shards of the shattered glass whining underneath his weight.

He has a man to kill and this time, it is with such unlawful resentment, personal. )

The bullet kicks free from its restraints and punches out on the other side of Jae-euns skull.

His body goes lax and falls limply to the side, leaving a wicked smear of blood agains the wall, almost analogous to the sable wings of the archangel, vast and burgeoning from his shoulders with intent.

The muzzle of a Beretta 92FS is burnt into the square his forehead, the mark scorched and annular, Donghyuck couldn't help but reference the mark to human branding. "Bastard becomes the bitch, how fucking ironic."

How strange, like this Jae-eun looks graphically akin to a sculpture of Saint Lawrence, teetering between a violence for the damned and a tragedious tenderness.  
Head theatrically thrown back, his thick neck curved statuesquely and Roman. Mouth ajar, his eyes too, blind and unyielding. A single drop of blood sliding down his forehead and over the cross of his brow and alongside the streak curving down his upper lip, devilishly vibrant in the neon lights. The richness of the red bold and glaring against his paling skin.

He's anthromorphistic to Bernini's Italian gods, his illusions, his salvations. As undying as marble and what allows a man to terrorize, to destroy.

The romantic genius, and perhaps the romantic flaw.

_Jeon "Jails" Jae-eun, 36, deceased in his suite. Execution by contact shot to the head. Payment not required._

 

 

**Act II** The Fall  
**New York**  
**Manhattan, Little Italy**

Jeno Lee awakes from a lousy, weightless sleep to a feeling of ennui.

He's laying motionless in bed, cotton sheets pooling right beneath the terminal jut of his bare ribs and snaking across a pale thigh, lean muscles taunt beneath the gaze of the sun. Lolled warm in the sunlight streaming through his window.

He's bleary eyed, his room looks like light. Muscles aching with lethargy. Jeno takes a breath with his chest and flits his fingers over the small road bumps of his ribs, a mosaic of small hills and rivers. A mole sits daintily beneath his third rib.

He's listning to the sounds in the apartment, blinking the dreams out of his eyes. He hears the familiar sound of footsteps coming down the hall, their erratic stumbling and mellow mumbles, growing louder as they're approaching his door, creeping up his spine like a malignant cancer.

"Fuck, your apartment looks like shit." A man says.

They pass by his door.

"You're no fuckin' Jeff Lewis" His mother replies, voice hoarse and vexed.

Jeno winces and rolls onto his side, facing his large double hung window.

He had stuck large sangria red stickers to the outside of the glass, one day; when he had felt the yen to climb out and sit on the red fire escape stairs. They were in big bold hangul with a filmy white outline, reading ' _Dandelion Child'_. The color of the print had weathered down and become dull with time as clouds rumbling with rain rolled across the belly of the sky, ominous like smoke.

The glare of the sun catches his eye, softening the iris to a copper, burning beguilingly like church windows. His cheek tranquilizingly abask in a sunbeam.

He's tracing the tip of his finger up and down his inner wrist, where the skin is soft and sensitive, raising goosebumps at the gentle touch.

It is a tender effort to while away the endless mornings, and they idly slip away when he's dreaming.

He's resided in this neighborhood as long as he can remember, conjured by the worst people Jeno's ever met.

He doesn't believe it's necessarily a bad place, more so that he's been aided by bad intentions his entire youth.

Of Mr. Wu who had ruffled Jeno's hair and looked him with rapacious eyes, like a pair of yellow moons, before being shoved into the chilly back of a _NYPD_ car. Jeno remembers the sound of the rough fabric of his jeans dragging against the leathers seats, how he stood on the sidewalk and witnessed the police car hitting the pot hole as it drove away. What Mr. Wu had done is heinous beyond comprehension, and far too severe for Jeno to grasp at age 12.

Mother had stood and watched, too, slung over the balcony railing, eyes bloodshot. It had given him a sinking epiphany of the transparency he carries like a child on his back, like a bruise.  
Did her eyes hurt at the sight of him?

Of Haneul, godawful and infamous, who presented circumstances that Jeno used to cast empirical blame for his loneliness. Haneul who'd grew up enraged, display 'Antisocial Tendencies'. ( According to studies conducted by animal abuse in early childhood. Jeno found it bitterly akin to criminals like Alberto DeSalvo, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer. His parents would rather hear the neighbors complain about their dead cats than admit their own son to be a psychopath. ) He remembered him with olive skin and dark circles under his eyes. His hands ever taking, never giving.

He had wished for a cat, one he could find comfort in, but naturally a wish that was rejected. It was horribly isolating from everything Jeno ever wished for, and in this depressing vein of melancholy he resided woefully.

He's 18 now, but still seem to be confined within this interlude of hopelessness.

A commotion erupts deep in the apartment and Jeno shuts his eyes tightly to will away a headache.

"The fuck you mean you're out of money!" His mother yells, her voice thin with hoarseness.

A door flies open, its impact trembles like a child in the walls and aches in Jeno's back as he tenses.

"I'm just a bit short of it now, aye!" The man yells back. The floorboards outside Jeno's room whines underneath thundering footsteps.

"Short of money? Short of fucking money! What the fuck do you take me as!" There's clangs and clatters of objects being thrown and rolling across the floor.

"Aye you're fucking crazy!"

"I need those money!"

"Fucking junkie cunt!"

The front door slams shut and his mother drives her fist into a wall, then Jeno can hear her footsteps padding across the apartment.

He gets up in a preposterously jaded daze — vertiginous, hypnotized and tongue gravely parched — facing an itching inability to stay, to bear the liability settling into his limbs; for he is sculptured like his father, and he wears the legacy of delicately calibrated, heart-wrenching pain he had left behind. It's in the saturation his hair, the angle of his nose, the clarity in his eyes.

He haphazardly collects clothes strewn across the floor and gets dressed in a light-headed haze, pulling on a pair of washed out cuffed dad jeans and a white t-shirt, oversized on his lean frame. His door wails as he opens it and it does nothing but worsen his headache.

Jeno ventures into the apartment. He discovers his mother, as she sits curled up on their small balcony, smoking a cigarette. The door is open only by a sliver, and the pungent smell of the cigarette lingers faintly in the room.

Her fingers are long and gangly, and sitting hunched makes the knots in her spine stick out like knuckles from her back. Body gaunt and angular, disfigured from years of drugs. A wealth of purple marks across her arms and hands, skin dull and ashen.

He saw it in his mother, his mother's druggie friends. The way their skeleton appeared so vast for their bodies; projecting out of their skin like a teeth. Their ribs 18 gaping mouths, Jeno hypothesized their bones might be eating them alive, not the other way around.

He's never blamed her for it. How transparent he is to her, how he inherits it in the bumps of his knuckles, as he's nuanced as his father.

No words can stop the numbness from spreading across his skin, anyways.

He couldn't blame her when she 'd fed him Adderall pills to make him sluggish enough to not ask about about him. They didn't share much in common, anyways, Jeno and his mother. Though, his father said they had the same eyes. Jeno could see that.

For Jeno bears the consuming emptiness his father left for his lungs like a child, he bears the nuance of night his father left as a gloriole; it's spreading, paralyzing, crippling him.

It's a devil with two faces; dragging itself up his body, giving up its mind, the fullness of its fingers, the throbbing of its heart. It has given him its destruction.

He wears it bare faced and pliant. For he will always be part father, what kind of heartbreak does that make him? What kind of hunger does he inherit?

Jeno had figured that when he started to grow into his father, slender and angular, he'd started to die in his mothers mind, too.

The kitchen and living room is joint, the walls an cream white and the room could be bright and airy if not for its years of neglect.

The space is disordered, cluttered with scatters of loose milky white pills, most likely a jumble of Oxycodone and Valium, empty aluminum soda cans. Pocket bundles of dollar bills, odd pairs of spoons and forks, used ceramic mugs with small dams of coffee's bitter dregs and littered cigarette butts.

The mirrors on the walls are all turned the wrong way, a mirage of walls upon walls upon walls. He wondered what the sky looked like the day his mother decided to unsee.

Did she undo her eyes so she could sleep at night? Can she still smell the gasoline on his skin?

The room feels stifling and Jeno's hit by a wave of nausea. He rocks on his heel and grounds himself with his palms flat against the linoleum counter, putting all his weight on his arms. Pressing his forehead against the cool wooden cabinet, the surface soothing against this malignant state of vertigo.

These tragedies will feed him until he's nothing but a fever dream.

Who will his mother see today when she looks at him, what drugs will her breath morph into? Is he a shadow show of smoke, or perhaps merely so, achingly shy?

Perhaps these thoughts grew from his perplexity of the situation. Something he creates to replace the fear of the unaccountability of his mothers actions, to justify his pain, to justify his father.

Jeno needs something to rest his eyes on. To find something to soothe his mind, his raging anger, his fears. His mother probably wanted to get drugged in peace too, let another cigarette burn forgettable callouses onto her knuckles.  
He's a sacrifice, a tigers-head.

Jeno quickly puts on a pair of white textile sneakers and then leaves on a desultory path, the unknown settling into his veins.

The sound of the door falling shut behind him an mollifying force, soothing the ache in his spine.  
This tragedy will take time undoing from his blood.

He lives in an apartment hotel complex. The hallway walls are a pearl white, suffocated by a nimiety of graffiti accumulated through the endless years.

The mouth of the hallway is marked by two panels of colored glass block windows, the case scarred and hickory brown, paint chipped and wood cracking in long marbling veins. Someone had messily written _'Notte in bianco'_ across the glass in white spray paint.

Jeno sees a boy lounging past the hallway, by the staircase.

Jaemin Na is sitting with his thighs between the bars of the ornate iron-wrought railing, curling sinuously into spirals and flowers, connecting serpentine lines and leaves. Separating the path of dark tiles and a 6 floor death-drop. The top tangles around two different wooden hickory railings and finishes around the highest golden rod.

He holds a cigarette loosely between soft, unblemished fingers and Jeno thinks it is such a juxtaposition to the fresh image of his mother.

Behind his silhouette is a parallel set of colored windows. However, instead of an empty frame, there's an ajar hickory door in place.

The flooring is a pale grey porcelain stone imitation, made to look like quartzite, roughly bordered with darker tiles and so worn there was a toddlers tooth gap between the them.

Jaemin hears Jeno's approaching footsteps and hastily puts the cigarette down, placing it near the edge of the dark quartzite and tilts his head up in faux innocence. As if he expects Jeno to care.

His shirt almost falls off his right shoulder, exposing summer tan skin.

A checkered metal fence stretches across the roof, a mandevilla climbs across the fence and down the walls, coming to curl like hands around the railing and in its overgrown state, hang over the rods. Its flowers silken and a rich crimson against the pale walls, leaves large and vibrant.

Jeno's gotten a few feet past Na when he decides to speak up.

"Hi." He says. Jaemin has a deep voice, deeper than Jeno's and pleasant to listen to.

Jeno stops and turns to look at him. His usually kind features has a stark smear of blood incarnadining his upper lip, staining a bit on his lower one. Matching the smudge of red on the side of his hand, right where his thumb juts out.

"Why'd you hide the cigarette." Jeno asks instead, disregarding Jaemin's greeting.

"This building is fucking full of rats, don't want my old man to find out." Jaemin picks up the cigarette again and takes a deep drag, then exhales with fluttering eyelashes, thick and the color of bistre, and shaking fingers. The halo of the cigarette burns an intrusive orange, round and sizzling as the iris of an hellhound.

"Got enough problems already." He murmurs.

Jeno leans down a bit and observes the maturing bruise on Jaemin's cheek. He shyly, or maybe in shame, jerks his head away from Jeno's scrutinizing eyes; uncaring and obscured in shadows.

He had heard the fight next door the pervious night. Mister Na's voice vodka clear, hand wrapped around the neck of a bottle which scream is intrusive and shrill as the bottom half is crushed against the wall.

Jaemin is usually the one recipient of his fathers rage. It is much easier to be the judge of a son than of a wife.

His mother is a frail woman, but Jaemin had been grown up tall and broad, which made him an more self-righteous target for vituperative outbursts and perhaps, to feed his father's amour propre, too.

They stare at each other for a few moments, and Jeno sees himself catoptric in Jaemin's inert purgatory.

His desperation reflects on Jaemin's desperation, and all he can seize is desperation. Jeno, somewhat, hates him for it. Hates Jaemin for going though the same hurt as him. The same aching hunger. The same grief of trauma.

They're the kind of boys whose name you forget. Knowable in their trouble, everyone knows them, no one personally. The ghosts of boys and the theory of Dante. The kids who are as limitless as nights, sharp as a tiger's tooth.

You know Jaemin, who's faceless, nameless. Who wears a scar running down the arch of his left collarbone, and the switchblade ( Pantone: Japanese Carmine, The Open Mouth Of Jeno Lee ) in his back pocket. The kids that ride the train from start to end during endless nights,

A teasing smile grows across Jaemin's face. He stands up, limbs long and shoulders broad. A hand grips the glazed wood railing and he leans his weight in the opposite direction so he stand tilted, swaying a bit out of devilment. "Heading out without me, babe?"

"Fuck off, Na." Jeno sneers and turns on his heel to continue his way down the stairs. "Don't try anything. I'll knock your teeth out."

There has always been this unaccountable air of aggression, underlying with playful devilry. Jaemin and Jeno was a correlation under imitated anarchy: when unstoppable mayhem meets the macabre core of primordial instincts. Tooth to tooth.

"Well, aren't you an angel today." Jaemin teases and even with his back turnt to the boy Jeno can hear the smile in his voice. Even as he steps down the stairs he knows Jaemin will follow closely behind.

Jeno snorts. "Only for you."

"At least i get to keep my kneecaps." Jaemin quips.

When they reach the first central landing Jaemin mischievously shoves Jeno shoulder-first into the wall and takes off bounding down the stairs before Jeno can reprimand. Who quickly pushes off the wall and chases after him. The thumping of their sneakers against the stone stairs echoes, traveling down the angular spiral of the staircase like a haunting.

They virtually fly down five floors. At one point they startle an old lady called Lola, carrying an armful of brown paper bags filled with groceries in her arms, and yells out a doubtfully apologetics _Sorry Miss_ as they're incited with mirroring each others adrenaline.

The bottom floor consists of a lobby, tiled with the same light grey faux porcelain quartzite. The entrance is heavy, decorated with thick panels of glass windows and groaning with a clear bell high squeak, choir-like and obnoxious, as Jeno pulls the door open.

The air is sultry and wind-still. Jeno feels like a foreign villain to the sun as it beams down on them.

They take the two steps down to the streets in strides.

The stairs are decorated with a similarly patterned wrought fence as the one inside and the exterior of the building is made of bricks in a muted nuance of coffee, the windows lined with a fairer brown that appears almost like crowns. The entrance is framed by thick planes of grey stone, that's adorned by a simple silver plate wearing the address engraved in it. Two sculpture in cement rises at the top, almost rising like a wave before folding into itself, sprouting into gentle spirals at the top as it dives out once again.

Set between an intimate bijou tattoo parlor, with rusted neon signs and bouquets of flowers standing in large black buckets outside on the sidewalk and a small Thai take-away, with a rich aroma of warm oil and fried tofu, parading a worn carnelian awning crossed with bold white letters. The shop is duskily lit, the door situated between a huge panel of window and a strip of glass covered with menu sheets and news paper pages written in Thai, some printed with grainy pictures of tropical forests and some with monochrome photos of faces on the cover.

They are heading to the corner convenience store just two buildings down. It's a family owned business, belonging to the line of an Italian family who had came to America during the early 1980's.

The facade is a soft yellow, the paint chipped and worn with years and the wood is veined with cracks. People had stuck locks to a plethora of rusting hoops attached to the facade. A pair of half moon steps leads up to the entrance on the corner of the store, flit between two small ramps lined with wrought fence. The pillar situated on the right side on the top of stairs is plastered with the bold lettering of an ad.

Big windows showcases metal shelves stacked with multicolored cleaning supplies and is framed in a dark wood. The yellow jut of a windowsill has large chunks of wood missing at bottom.

The stretch of an awning traces alongside the facade, colored mahogany and a faded sacramento green and lines with bold white letters. The umbrella fabric had faded and dappled through the years, and the bottom is is cut in a zig zag pattern, traced in a white line.

The two strips of windows framing the door are plastered with colorful ads from the 50's and the door itself makes a tinkling bell noise when Jeno pushes it open.

It's a small shop, with high wooden shelves, boxy retro silver refrigerations with sliding doors and checkerboard floors. The checkout desk a big slab of wood at the front of the store.

"How's your old hag?" Jaemin asks as they are weaving their way through the store, almost stepping on Jeno's heels, who ducks behind a tall metal stand filled with rows of colorful bags of chips and ventures between the isles.

"Christ, i'm fuckin' surprised she hasn't just sold me off to some pimp for drugs yet."

Jaemin snorts and Jeno turns his head to send Jaemin a grin over his shoulder, then abruptly bumps into a solid body as he rounds the corner.

A man extends an arm to steady him as he stumbles back. "Woah there, kid"

Jeno tears his arm away from the man's grip.

They're standing in an isle between the milk refrigerators and messily stacked colorful paper jars of instant coffee, round with plastic lids. He has to tilt his head up to look at his face.

The man is fairly tall, quite a bit taller than Jeno at least. Tan skin, eyes crinkling as he gives Jeno a small grin and skims his eyes over his frame.

Jeno finds the curiosity in which the man looks at him to be unsettling, so he straightens his back and squares his shoulders. The man doesn't look angry, but he doesn't come off as kind either and he wonders if he is as deceitful as treacherous land.

"Fucking watch it next time" Jeno says through gritted teeth, clenching his jaw. "You're in my way"

He sidesteps to push past the man, who then follows to impediment him from passing by in the narrow isle.

Jeno raises his head, eyes riveted on his for a tense moment and then directs his gaze to the small boy behind the man. They lock eyes for a moment, his gaze is antagonistic and Jeno suppresses a shiver.

"In a hurry?" The man asks with a raised eyebrow, appearing amused to Jeno's irritation.

He grits his teeth. "Yeah, so fuck outta' my way."

"Aren't you a piece of work." The man remarks. Though, he sounds delighted. "You got one hell ova' mouth on you boy."

"Fuck do you care for?" Jeno snarls.

He feels quite intimidated by the force of this man's personality, and even more so, provoked by him.

"Dogs have such sharp teeth. Especially when cornered." He says and Jeno finds him almost daunting. "An old friend used to own an old Rottweiler, bought it off some cunt breeding canines for cage fighting. The old cur used to growl at any fucker who dared to look at him the wrong way. One day this fucking loanshark - fake, you know that black market shit - came by, almost knockin' down the door, bustin' his fucking balls. The man took one look at the dog before it bit his entire fucking face off. They had to drag him out with his jacket in one hand and his nose in the other."

Although the iniquity in his anecdote, he grins widely.

"Yeah, Some things are better left alone." Jeno replies, the connotation no longer reffering to dogs.

The corner of the man's lips quirks up and in his eyes looms trauma. "Attaboy. I respect your sting."

Jeno glowers and eyes the man up and down.

He's dressed in a cream colored suit, appearing to be made out of a thick and luxurious material. A gold watch rests snug around his wrist and glitters in the store lights. This man looks as if he is absolutely chock-full with cash and alongside his strange, imposing demeanor, Jeno figures he's not a legal angel.

Jeno huffs out an amused breath. "You talk a lot of shit." He pauses and pokes his inner cheek with his tongue, in his eyes brew disobedience. "Makes you sound like a 5-O"

As he had hoped, the man's expression sours, and Jeno finds himself endeavoring to not indulge in a shit-eating grin. He opens his mouth to say something spiteful again but is interrupted by another man, abruptly appearing as he storms up to Jaemin and takes forceful grip on his arm.

"You were in here stealing shit the other day!" His hands are gnarled with veins, sinuous bumps climbing up his arms and the fabric of Jaemin's white shirt bunches up in the gaps between his squeezing fingers.

Jeno recognizes him as the owner of the store, usually standing behind the register with attentiveness to his customer. He appears to be in his 40's and is fairly tall. He has a fleshy nose, tan skin guttate with liver spots and hair a blonde darkened with age.

The owner recognizes Jaemin from a few nights ago, when he had been caught red handed stealing food and ran away when the store owner started yelling at him. His features distinct even underneath the shadow veil of his hood.

"Fuck no i wasn't. Let go of my fucking arm." Jaemin snarls, trying to extricate himself from the man's grip.

"Stronzo figlio di puttana." The man swears under his breath. "You think you can just fuck up profit for me and get away with it?"

"Eat shit." Jaemin smirks.

The man jerks at his arm and his grip is hurting. "Fess' up kid or i'll fucking force it out of you. Deadbeats like you run around thinking you can do whatever you want, getting fresh and thinking you own the world. Do i need to teach you some respect, yeah?"

"You're bullshitting."

"Ora ti ammazzo" The store owners teeth grit, his eyes storming and grave gray.

Jaemin spits in his face.

Jeno's on the verge of intervening as the owner tightens his grip and attempts to manhandle him towards the heart of the store, but the man steps forward scarcely in time, his jaw tense as he grabs the back of the owner's neck, squeezing it assertively in a silent warning.

"Vito" He greets cheerfully, but his grin doesn't reach his eyes, unlit and sinister. "Is that how you treat associates?

Vito's demeanor waver in consternation as he faces the man and then wistfully, casts his eyes to the checkerboard floor. "Nuh-no, mi dispiace."

The man leans in and lowers his voice, eyes trained on Vito. "No no, that's not good enough. I'm worried you're not dedicated to our agreement, Vito." He pats him on the chest, the manner derogatory. "You say you've got my back but now you're treating my associates like they're garbage right in front of me as if i'm a fucking retard."

"I don' mean no disrespect." Vito replies. Trembling with that invisible gun to his head.

"Of course you don't." He says. "How far would you go for me, Vito?"

"I'll do anything you ask of me" Vito finally raises his head and look the man in the eyes. "Whatever you want me to do, i'll do it."

"Good, that's what i like to hear." The man tilts his head. "You're going to show them where you belong, Vito, and you gotta prove to me how sorry you are."

"How?" Vito asks.

The man smirks a bit and keeps his voice low and clear as he speaks. Eyes glinting dangerously. "Get down on the floor like a fucking cocksucker and kiss his shoes."

Vito falls silent and after a few seconds he shakily gets down on his knees. He however hesitates a moment too long and the man presses a designer shoe into the square of his back, forcing him onto the ground. Even as he is laying down he doesn't remove his foot, instead he digs it into his back. "You're loyal to my name aren't you, Vito? Think about your son."

Vito's entire body is trembling as he leans forward slowly and lightly presses his lips to the toe-cap of Jaemin's beat up sneakers. Who is inordinately, disturbed to do anything but swallow thickly.

The man digs the heel of his handmade Sutor Mantellassi shoe into Vito's back, who inhales sharply, his chest trapped between the pressure of Myungdae's foot and the hard checkerboard floor.

Myungdae is dehumanizing, tyrannizing, he lets Vito to know he is inferior to him.

"What do you think Matteo would say if he knew his father went around spewing shit. You don't want anything to happen to him, do you now Vito?" The man says.

Vito erratically shakes his head. "Signore ti prego, don't hurt him."

"Now Vito now don't be like that. You know me, we have a deal, yeah. We're friends." He speaks with conviction and his demeanor appears perfidiously calm.

Vito nods tensely. His forehead glistening in the white lights.

"Of course we are. And friends stay loyal to each other." The man digs his heel harder into Vito's back, who whimpers in pain. "You see, Vito, i take this very seriously and so should you, for Matteo. You don't wanna lose me as a friend now, do you?"

Vito shakes his head, flustered and eyes begging.

"Good boy. I knew you would come around." The man removes his foot and crouches down. Vito's hair is matted to his face, gleaming with a sheen of sweat. The scene had been quite gut-wrenching and Jeno can almost feel the phantom sensation of his trembling beneath his own foot. "Let's not do that again, we don't want to create a problem. I own you, remember that."

Vito can only muster a nod.

"Good." The man smiles, clapping twice cheerfully. "Now where's my money?"

Vito leaves with a hole in his pocket the size of a duffle bag and a Sutor Mantellassi shoe print on the back of his shirt.

Vito had gotten involved with Myungdae through gambling. He had been incredibly unwise and had bet on more money than what he could pay, and so, Myungdae had struck a deal. He was to come collect a monthly ransom of cash until Vito's debts were cleared.

Vito had been naive. Myungdae isn't a man to keep his promises, and he is unfortunately not a man to allow profit to be lost without retaliation. He is decadent like that. A devil in a deal, looming as an angel on a mural.

Myungdae had came by on the first weekend with a dozen of men, carrying metal baseball bats and black duffle bags, threatening to smash his skull in. He had collected way more money than Vito could afford.

They took his son, Matteo, too, as a hostage. Pulled a hood over his head and tied him to a chair.

Myungdae would hand Vito monochrome photographs, glossy and freshly printed, portraying close-ups of broken noses with the river of a cut running across the bridge and the half moons of loose nails. As long as he had Matteo, Myungdae would invariably have the power to get Vito to follow orders like a hound.

The moment Vito had signed the deal Myungdae owned him.

He turns to them and offers his hand. "Myungdae Moon." He says.

Jeno blatantly rejects his handshake.

"Jaemin Na." Jaemin introduces himself.

"Jeno Lee." Jeno follows curtly. His face set as an uninviting scowl.

Myungdae didn't seem vexed over the rejection, instead he simply withdraws his hand to his side and his grin remains resolute.

The boy accompanying Myungdae is leaning on a shelving system, spinning one of his dainty silver rings around his finger in apathy.

He is gracefully small-boned. His skin almost seems diaphanous in its paleness, face elfin. His eyes are jaded and dark, appearing as large half moons, obscured and nonchalant even as they dazzle beneath the lights.

"Renjun Huang." He eventually offers. His voice velvety and lovely.

He nearly has an archaic charm, classically frail and ageless. A delicacy that was not very modern, but attractive nonetheless. The kind of boy Jeno imagined who had the moon sunk into his skin. Temporary and waning beautifully, tragically.

"You some kinda goodfella or something?" Jeno asks Myungdae after a moment of white silence.

Myungdae's smile widens and Jeno thinks he is grinning like a villain. "Think of me as a philanthropist. I can make all of your fucking dreams come true."

Jeno snorts. "You seem lie a shitty fucking philanthropist to me."

"You don't believe me?" Myungdae says.

Jeno's eyes are riveted in his, hostile and obstinate. "Sounds like you're bullshitting."

Myungdae tears his gaze away, drifting to Jaemin instead. "Juvenile facilities really like pretty boys. You would have fit right in on your knees, don't you think?"

"You have fucking issues." Jeno snarls.

Myungdae ignores Jeno. His provoking unflagging and if not for how Jeno's crestfallen childhood had played out, he would most likely feel agitated with the force of his approach. "I think i've been pretty generous. Could've let Vito call the pigs on you. I deserve a thank you at least, no?"

His mannerisms are blithe, almost cruelly sadistic. His eyes as intense as a fox's. He seems to have an unerring and bloodhoundish sense of how to get under their skin.

As much as it shouldn't, it sparks a wicked interest within the boys. The power of someone so crude causes a morbid curiosity for eyes that yearns to see something new, carry lungs that won't whistle like church bells.

"You don't know me, so why the fuck do you care?" Jaemin asks.

Myungdae smiles. "You remind me of someone." He says. "I'll be honest with you, boy, so you can be honest with me. If you keep going like this your blood is gonna end up on the streets. You'll become a junkie, shooting up in an alleyway, or in jail."

There's an unnerving silence, during which Myungdae's eyes riveted on his. It feels equally invasive as it feels vulnerable and Jeno hardens his expression to hide how exposed he becomes.

"Congratulations, you've figured out this life is a fucking shit show." Jeno says wryly.

His largest trepidation is to end up like his parents, this anxiety settles in his chest and keeps him up at nights. He suppose it would be his fatal flaw, this fear, or perhaps, this future.

Myungdae chuckles and tilts his head a bit as he eyes them. "I have a proposition." He says. "I can get you out of this life. Can get you off the fuckin' streets."

"You're fucking nuts." Jaemin says lowly.

"You've seen shit, i can see it on you." Jeno despises how transparent his expressions are to this man. "A man who has seen death will no longer fear it. I've dealt with men who have hurled their guts up at the sight of a gun. It's inefficient. It's weak. Fucking child's play. Do you think i can be around men like that?"

"We're not interested in being your little lap dogs." Jeno says.

"I won't lie. You're profitable, Jeno Lee. Cos' someone who can fight, will fight. But it also proves that you're not weak." Myungdae leans down a bit, his voice husky. "I can help you take revenge on the world, kid. Help you release all that fucking pent up anger. I can make something out of you. What you have in here — ," He pokes Jeno's chest. "Is a fucking bomb. With me you'll never be powerless again."

Jeno stares at him, on the verge of rejecting his offer, when he's struck with a strange sense of defiance. This malnourished curiosity of a possible way out of his life unparalleled. He thinks to himself: _Why not?_ Jeno huffs in grim disbelief. "God, you're a lunatic."

Myungdae's lips quirks up, and Jeno feels slightly giddy with the force of Myungdae's presence, crude and more powerful than any man Jeno's ever met, promising Jeno what he's desired his entire youth. "I think you are, too."

Jeno finds the wicked temptation of his offer eclipsing the steadily receding alarm he first faced. The dissolute promise of possibilities hopeful against his drab childhood.

Myungdae must have seen the shift in his eyes, the veering from anger to determination. For his lips quirk up, smiling comforting at him.

He is concise; crossing of Mulberry and Grand 9:00 p.m. sharp, a black Rolls-Royce Phantom EWB will be anticipating them. "Don't be late, or i'll take your answer as a no."

Myungdae's briskly receding back is the stretch of an horizon, broad and dominant, appearing as a Goliath in the narrow isles. A bank robber of wings, Jeno's back aching yearningly.

Renjun Huang, however, lingers. The way the florescent lights paled his skin to a lucidity, casting shadows underneath his eyes, grave and mourning, makes him appear almost like an apparition. He's someones murdered dreams, he's the grief of hope. These scars will not get undone.

He eventually turns to leave, but halts mid-step. His shoulders are tense and Jeno feels like a foreigner beneath the fix of his stare as he turns his head to glare at them over his shoulder. "This world is full of evil. You're not bad people, you're just people in bad situations." He says, and Jeno almost wants to reach out to see if he's real. "Get out of this while you still have a choice, cause' if you accept you'll become his property. The only way to get out of his grasp once he has a hold of you is by feeding yourself a fucking bullet."

"He didn't seem that bad" Jaemin says.

"You're right. He's a fucking saint if you have a death wish." Renjun's expression is grim, in such an imposingly, haunting way. The convenience store lights glaring and painfully white, reflecting in the black of his hair and on the bridge of his nose. "You'll be his men, and men die."

Then, he's gone. A haunting smear of soft coal against the milk carton's alice blue, the only proof he was ever there the bitter words hanging in the air, sour as black coffee on an empty stomach.

Jeno can't help but wonder how many times Renjun had pushed the barrel of a gun into his mouth.

He stands in a dream, his head spinning from the encounter with Myungdae Moon. Almost akin to vertigo. He was so tempestuously, acutely, achingly conscious about how miserably he longed for a way out of his life.

The checkerboard floor seems to bend, flow and spiral into nameless shapes, into figures without homes — they're laughing at him, mumbling forbidden hymns like death on asphalt.

In this state, Jeno is reduced to the mirage of a dream. Overhead the lights turn red. You can no longer see the whites of eyes. It's the phantom pain of a bloody monster, and it drags itself across the floor. The monster hooks it's claws in the legs of his pants and it's dragging itself up his body. It's heading for his crown.

Is Myungdae hell, or simply, a necessary evil? When the idea of a god, is what brought us biblical destruction.

Welcome to Little Italy.

 

 

**Act III** Dragon Well  
**New York**  
**Manhattan, Chinatown**

A conspicuous sea of Chinese silk lanterns, a shoal of rosso corsa. Moving like the belly of a five clawed dragon. Rippling through the night sky, there are no stars there, no landlines. Only the bruised silver of clouds.

The back garden of Chang'e, a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown, restful and rich in authenticity, smelled like homeward rainstorms and cigar smoke and sapid Longjing tea. Like pan roasted leaves and gardenias mingled with blush lotus flowers and wet asphalt. The air felt thick and sultry, the kind correlating with oncoming thunder.

A garden of drippy trees and the gentle ripple of ponds situated between a coronary of three mundane brick apartment buildings. Flowers blossom like the tender flush of a virgin and they rise from the ground wild and lovely. Butterfly koi fish in bold colors ripple through the joint streams and ponds, moving in hypnotic patterns of a kaleidoscope.

The garden is an restricted area and albeit the saintly scenery, as anything with a remarkable beauty, it has its respective secrets.

It is a central point, intrinsically, as an aid for predominantly hitmen, to meet. Given their line of work secrecy is much required, and albeit their nature, the place is merely casual and works more significantly as a neutral ground.

Theres a winding stone path that leads through a gate, attached to a wall of simple striped fence the color of pitch, and into the thick of the garden.

Around a grande garden table, made of tightly wrought, creating delicate ornate patterns, black metal and cold to the touch, sits a configuration of five men; Taeyong Lee, Yuta Nakamoto, Doyoung Kim, Myungdae Moon and Renjun Huang.

"I have someone to introduce you to." Myungdae says, observing his cards for their game of Dou Dizhu.

Doyoung Kim raises an eyebrow, clearly uninterested. "New blood?"

He appears as perhaps the most unusual of the men in the context of high-end reapers; his features are delicate and relaxed, his frame almost precariously thin. Hair inky black and wide eyes, but still, his gaze heavy and vigilant. They're dark and gleaming in the night, even as his expression edges into a frown of boredom.

He's clad in an oversized blazer, the fabric black and limp, over a cream colored turtleneck and paired with black slacks. It fits delightfully on his slender frame and as he lazily leans back to sit with his arms braced on the chair's spine, he exposes a waist holster and the daunting shadow of a gun.

"You could say that." Myungdae picks his arm up and scans the time indicated on his wristwatch.

It is a Patek Philippe, 18 karat gold and prominently luxurious. The case captures the light from the lanterns and they shimmer across the smooth surface in glowing ripples of siren red as he angles his wrist. "They should be here any minute."

The gate squeaks as it opens, and from the other side of the high striped metal fence steps, where a strip of unevenly stoned floor, domestic plants and the backdoor to the restaurant lays, three figures emanate; one of Myungdae's lackeys followed by a pair of boys, almost whimsically on cue.

They're lead on the stone walkway and into the thick of the garden, following alongside a stream debouching into diverse ponds, to the tightly paved platform where the table arrangement is.

The first boy is lean but broad and of whiskey tones. His build is larger than the boy behind him, but his features softer, pulled into a thoughtful, or perhaps nervous, frown. With golden brown hair parted in the middle and soft slopes of his nose and jaw. On his cheek thrives a nasty, purple bruise.

He looks like honey and trepidation. Dressed in an oversized starchy white shirt that billows in the wind as he approaches, sleeves rolled up to his elbows and fists thrust into the pockets of his trousers.

The second boy has coarse, pale skin, contrasted against his black turtleneck. Features elegant and cat like; eyes sharp and sloped, a dainty beauty mark under his right eye and a classic chisel of his cheekbones. His hair is the rich color of obsidian, parted on the right and brushed away from his face. A few haphazard forelocks has strayed away and hangs in gentle wisps over his forehead.

It gives his eyes the appearance of being tired, dark and carrying the vestiges of restless nights. The same cloudy, and grave, gaze as ones of angels, heavy with the tears for things. Leaden with sleep, unless he is sleeping now.

In the throng of pale pink tree peonies and vibrant Manchurian apricot's he is almost tantamount to marble sculptures, with features fine and dramatic.

Jeno walks with the phantom feeling of the opulent leather seats in the Rolls-Royce Phantom EWB against his palms.

It was so catholically luxurious, from the moment it rolled up to them at 9 pm sharp, with tinted windows and a sleek black exterior, to the imitation of a starry night sky as a roof.

The car interior allowed them be isolated from the driver by an opaque glass fascia and granted no sound but ones from Jeno and Jaemin.

It had left a strange feeling of detachability in Jeno. The same hollowness in his chest that Renjun Huang had. A loneliness so devouring it's almost decadent and Carried on his ribs, like hands of ghosts, as he is led through and to the backdrop of Chang'e's.

The garden is truly paradisal. Judiciously designed. Magnolia trees, white spireas, lotus flowers, platinum ogon and wholly black butterfly koi. The fragrance of the flowers lovely and intoxicating.

It is overwhelming and entirely dream-inducing, maddeningly so.

The lanterns lay incandescing in the aimless evening, their reflection distorted and red-hot in the dark water. A Buttefly Goshiki swims upstream, its tail moving like a gentle furling and unfurling of a fist. Its belly a milky silver, stretching into a back dappled with black and rich carmine.

A white Wisteria tree stretches over the small imitation river, the flowers looks like they're made of silk, and because of the gloaming dew, possesses a pearly sheen.

Myungdae casually motions for the boys to sit. They do, and Yuta scoffs audibly.

"Son of a bitch" He says and frowns deeply. "We said we didn't want any of your business here, Myungdae."

"I have a feeling you're not very fond of me, Nakamoto" Myungdae taunts and the corners of his mouth lifts slightly. His hair is slicked black and glossy and his hands, folded on the table before him, are rough and possesses a tan, leathery texture around the knuckles.

"Don't call me that." Yuta sneers. He has sharp eyes and a shrewd face. His hair soot-black and skin a warm tone in the light of the lanterns, casting dark, velvety shadows beneath his Adam's Apple and along the muscles in his throat.

Jeno immediately finds him standoffish and intimidating, but nonetheless, entirely as infatuating.

Both him and Myungdae are evidently dangerous men. However, Myungdae appears as a man to act upon rage. Unlawful and formidably temperamental. While Yuta Nakamoto, in his gelid approach, seems to be calculated and serpentine; only to move with motive and under complexly calibrated circumstances.

It makes him safer, but also, unreliable and incredibly fascinating.

"I don't understand why, i've been good lately, no?" Myungdae vexes.

"You have no business dragging others into your shit. The only reason i haven't sliced you up like a fucking pig yet, Myungdae, is cos' you're not even fucking worth the bother. Cut the crap." Yuta leans back into his chair, the sleeves of his black jacket rises far up on his wrists. Curiously enough, Jeno notices he's wearing a pair of red leather gloves. "You should be lucky, cos' i go to sleep every night thinking about how nice it would be to slice ya up."

Myungdae chuckles.

The air is heavy against their skin, as oppressive and idle as butterfly kisses.

A woman emerges from the restaurant holding a yixing clay teapot in her hands, characteristically unglazed and maroon, adorned with calligraphic engravings of traditional Chinese hanzi letters and elegant orchids. Her dark hair is pulled tightly into a bun, and she is dressed in all black. Her hands delicate and unmarked as she pours the tea with practiced grace.

"Something funny, Myungdae?" Yuta asks

The woman disappears as nimbly as she arrived.

"It's not every day a reaper says killing someone isn't worth their time." Myungdae grins, the whites of his teeth reflects the light from the lanterns and makes his eyes darker, almost vulturine.

Jeno's gaze sweeps over the table and lands on Renjun.

It evokes the same harrowing feeling as Jeno had felt the first time he met him. Violent and hopeless and terrifyingly beautiful .

He's fathomed that the sight of Renjun Huang is a sight that eats you up and leaves you starving. He's soft with a slender neck and slender wrists and albeit his delicate frame, he appears as nothing short of turblent. His eyes as dark and vacant as the mouth of a gun, they make Jeno's ribs ache with growing pains.

He looks like a stark contrast to Myungdae sitting next to him. The man is robust and callous, especially like this, with his legs spread wide and leaning back into his chair.

He sits as the kingpin of an empire would be expected to. Like he believes he is the closest thing a human comes to a god. Presenting pride in the category of Dante's 7 Deadly Sins. "Jeno, what do you think of Yuta?"

"Seems like he has a fucking chip on his shoulder." Jeno snarks, wooing a chuckle out of Myungdae.

"Congratulations, kid." Yuta says and leans in. "Under Myungdae you're going to learn the two greatest things in life. Who to trust and who to kill. I hope you don't got a weak stomach for when he sends ya out to bash someones head in cos' he is too much of a pussy to do it himself. Maybe if he's feelin' festive he'll drug ya up and send ya to Vegas, put ya in some slave coke factory."

Myungdae's expression turns sour.

"He pissing you off already, Nakamoto?" He says with a raised eyebrow. Then reaches into his inner pocket and when he retrieves his hand it is clutching a leather case — the material is a rich burgundy and a cursive stamp of the monogram _MM_ adorns its middle — and a sleek metal lighter in gold.

He opens the case and pulls out a cigar, then lights the butt and takes a deep drag. It burns a bright orange that reflects in the dark of his irises.

Jeno isn't used to being in the milieu of such high end criminals, and as it is intimidating, it is also thrilling. In the presence of creatures as cruelly charming, he realizes how truly attractive danger can be. An omnipresent brutality, an omnipresent immorality.

Myungdae gestures at Jeno. "Fesity ain't he, reminds me of Angel. It's that fierce look in his eyes, no?"

Myungdae takes another drag, then lays his hand on the edge of the table. Wisps of smoke leisurely rises from the crown of his cigar and he breathes out a tender plume of white. "Hm, s' a pity he ain't for sale, with a face that pretty and that personality to go with it, he's a fucking pearl. Angel could make some great profit."

Jeno languidly registers an untamed breeze of muted carnelian red, fanning across the brows of a boy and then the crisp click of a hammer on a semi-automatic being pulled. The sound is faint over the soothing noise of a small waterfall debouching into a pond, then he sees the muzzle of a gun pressing against the back of Myungdae Moon's skull.

The man stills.

"Talking shit again, Myungdae?" The boy's voice is high and melodious and appears so clear, and angelic, that Jeno almost believes he is stuck within the realms of a dream. The lights from the lanterns are as warm, and diabolical, as a blood moon and they saturate in the red of his hair. At this angle his eyelashes cast dusky, velvety shadows over the arch of his cheeks.

This, Jeno thought, feels tyrannical.

The fifth man, who has regarded them quietly since they stepped into the garden, speaks for the first time. He's wearing a knowing tilt to his head and smirks teasingly with such a sharp, animated smile.

"Hm, what's that phrase again?" He says. His voice is husky and pleasantly deep as he hums in thought.

This man holds a certain elegance. Angular and a parlous, thin frame. With pale skin and amber blonde hair, his eyes big and fictitious. Around this table of 7 men, he appears chic, wearing a leather trim black beret. His fingers tapping on the table are slender and marbled with veins.

He holds himself suave, his presence imposing and sophisticated. An ageless beauty, surreptitious and sly.

The beauty in romanticism, and the terror in it, too.

"Memento Mori, Myungdae. Remember that you're fucking deadly here." He says, the same wicked grin ever present.

A light sheen of sweat graces Myungdae's brow and he displays apprehension as he tightens his grip on the body of his cigar, burning away between his fingers. He makes an amused noise, but it is rather strained.

It appears, to Jeno's surprise, that he finds this situation unpredictable. He deems the man's unease alarming, and from their empirical knowledge, only favored by their modest amount of experience, uncharacteristic.

Curiosity burns vehemently in his gut.

"He is trained by you after all, Imugi. I expect no less." Myungdae says, his voice is stilted, and the look on his face makes it seem as if he is trying to appease the situation at hand.

Angel scoffs, then lowers the gun.

Myungdae gently relaxes his jaw and carefully uncurls his fingers from their tight grip on his Armani suit. For such a formidable presence and unlawful capability, he had seemed so immensely overpowered.

Angel is gone with a beautiful billowing of his shirt, his frame lithe and moving with practiced grace. He rounds the table and stops by Yuta's side, he places an affectionate arm around his shoulders and whispers in his ear. "Konbanwa, Yuta-kun."

Yuta smiles at him with a softness Jeno couldn't have imagined by his acute demeanor. The man's smile is wide and attractive, terribly enthralling against the sharp contrast of how his silver piercings scintillates against the lights.

He stops at Taeyong too and greets him with a gentle kiss on each cheek.

"Mon minou." The man says, sounding surprisingly eloquent in French and baring a cherishing smile. The rising moon an luminescing halo in the distance.

Angel tucks the Beretta into the hem of his fitted black slacks as he sits down at the table.

He's dressed in an oversized white silk shirt, unbuttoned slightly to reveal rich tan skin and elegant collarbones. The fabric follows his movements smoothly, almost hypnotizing. A band of black silk adorns his neck, embellished with a sun charm in rose gold, hanging by its middle from a small claw and gleaming luringly in unison with the opulence of golden piercings in his ears.

His eyes travel the table and lands on Jeno, dark and stormy, so unforgiving Jeno feels slightly delirious at their intensity.

He is captivating and as entirely intriguing as a stranger can be. Such beauty bear such an alluring trepidation. He's tantalizing, the sin in a soul. A pulchritude so terrifying it makes Jeno Lee quiver, so achingly untouchable. Regarding them with hazardous intent, ardently daring.

Jeno wonders what can such a boy bring, but violence and war.

He wonders how he will remember him, where his eyes will lay him. Maybe, behind the growth of the moon. Can he see how he trembles? Will he shift and twist like the night sky?

How deep will his teeth sink? Will the marks be accidental, temporary?

Will he stay quivering in those dark irises?

Will he sink away in the vanquishing weight of a Seraph's wings? Or is he, simply, born to die.

"You got anger issues, angel?" Myungdae taunts.

"You want to find out, Myungdae?" Angel mocks back. He sits with his elbows braced against the table, hand hanging limply and fingers slightly curled into the palm.

Myungdae's laughter is enlivened, then he takes another drag of his cigar and soft spirals of smoke escapes his nostrils. Pluming around his mouth like the breath of a dragon, and perhaps, as hazardous in nature.

A red-spotted purple lands on the proximal phalanx of Angel's finger and folds its wings. The base a rich blue, leading up in small spines to iridescent outer hindwing. Spotted with orange and white. Myungdae observes the butterfly.

"Weak creatures." He murmurs.

Angel glances over to him, gaze fierce and accusing, and Jeno realizes in a delightful, hypnotized state that you can see the warm reflections of the lanterns in his eyes. A plethora of small glitters floating idly.

"You look like everyone like they're beneath you, Myungdae. I find that theres few men in the world i truly believe are heartless, but you Myungdae, seem to be fully fucking capable without one." He says. The words themselves are red-hot, but he says them edging on nonchalance.

Angel sees the way Myungdae's fingers twitch in want as he eyes him. How they desire to feel the throbbing of a pulse beneath their prints, leave the cold imitation of a glory around his neck. He knew men like Myungdae, like Jae-eun, like the back of his hand.

Myungdae yearns for damnation. Myungdae yearns for wars.

He wishes to live as a tyrant, a catalyst of bloodshed in his name.

"You can't run an empire while withholding a heart, angel. You should know that more than anyone here." Myungdae grins, eyes crinkling at the corners with laughter lines.

"Touché." He responds without bothering to look at the man. Instead he inspects the butterfly with indifference.

A soft, damp breeze, smelling of summer rain and sweet azaleas perfume, blows by. It cards gently through Jeno's hair and feels pleasant against his feverish cheek. The heliotropic and familiar scent is dizzying and a haunting evocation of something omnibenevolent, numinous and looming.

The butterly flies off, its wings flapping soundlessly as a shiro utsuri butterfly koi breaks the surface. The growl of thunder is sinistrous in the distance and Jeno feels in a pleasant clarity the phantom feeling of standing at the receding edge of fine rain, prickling at the bridge of his nose and slender hands, murmuring hymns and the song of birds.

Angel meets Renjuns gaze, and is fixed with a knowing glint, dark as the night as the corners of his mouth quirks up in a small, mischievous smirk. The scene as oneiric and calculated as something out of a film noir, storming with eerie intent.

He's mouthing something at Renjun and Jaemin Na finds himself latching onto every word.

He realizes in ambivalence that perhaps his morbid longing for a life worth living will, if anything can compare he thinks disconsolated, serve as his downfall. He's realized this world he's just entered is carefully calibrated, elusively so, between the ungodly laws of who gets to live and who doesn't.

His neck prickles and he shivers as he interprets the words. This blood will take time undoing from his palms.

_"Make it burn."_

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first time posting on AO3!! I am well acquainted with Wattpads platform but i felt it was time to expand because i was curious to see if there would be any difference in the response i get on my stories. 
> 
> This is very different from what i have written before so i hope it is to a good standard :) Not to sound like a scout leader but even if you didn't enjoy this, since I'm aware blood and violence isn't for everyone, i still hope you can recognize my effort!!
> 
> This story is going to be kept pretty fast paced, because that is my personal preference, however next chapter is going to be Donghyucks backstory. We´re going to see how he met Taeyong and Myungdae and how he ended up as a hitman. ( Hint hint, we´re also getting a bit of Renjuns backstory. )
> 
> [Book Soundtrack](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/43Kze11vrp19GWBl1qcAG9?si=ICHaORDsQ0Cz-PO-v9if5Q) │ [Twitter](https://twitter.com/gothyucks) │ [CC](https://curiouscat.me/gremlinsanonymous) │ [Wattpad](https://www.wattpad.com/user/DUMBLEWHORES)


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